We Bought a Zoo: the true story behind the film

Jessica Salter23 June 2015 • 6:09pm

How the life of Benjamin Mee, a British writer who rescued a failing zoo while coming to terms with life as a widower and single father, inspired a Hollywood film starring Matt Damon

<br> This piece was first published in March 2012, to coincide with the release of the film We Bought a Zoo.

Late one afternoon in October 2006 Benjamin Mee was sitting in the kitchen of his new family home, contemplating a list of jobs, when his brother ran in shouting, "A big cat has escaped. This is not a drill". The home, which Mee had moved into four days earlier, was a dilapidated zoo, and a 150lb jaguar was on the loose.

Benjamin Mee is a very persuasive man. After his father died in early 2005 Mee had convinced his 76-year-old mother to sell the Surrey home in which he and his three brothers and sister had grown up, and to buy an old house on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon with a failing zoo attached. He had also persuaded his wife that they should leave their barn conversion in France, where they had been living for two years, and move their young family back to England to live with his mother and his brother Duncan.

The zoo was dangerously rundown. Mee was faced with myriad expensive tasks just to keep it afloat – including dealing with a rat infestation (£9,000) – not to mention finding the money to feed the animals, something that the six members of unpaid staff he inherited had been doing out of their own pockets.

Benjamin Mee with his son Milo and Matt Damon on the set of We Bought a Zoo.Credit:
Twentieth Century Fox

"There were lots of times when I thought, 'What have I done?’" Mee says now. "But when the jaguar escaped it was the first time I realised there were lives at stake."

I meet Benjamin Mee at Dartmoor Zoological Park on a bright September day. Dressed in shorts, a dark-green fleece and a beanie hat pulled down over his shaved head, he talks quickly and animatedly about the 200 animals in his care. These include Vlad, the Siberian tiger that loves trying to lick Mee’s hand through the fence, a schizophrenic ostrich on Prozac and a bear named Fudge, with 5in claws that need constant trimming.

We sit at a picnic bench outside the zoo’s restaurant, watching two Brazilian tapirs pottering about in their field. The zoo has a simple charm. From the unmanicured edges of the grass to the homemade laminated signs, it almost feels like someone’s back garden. Which, of course, it is; the Mee house is right in the centre of the park, with no ropes or fences segregating it from the public.

It was a series of life-changing circumstances that led to Mee buying the zoo. Mee, 46, a freelance journalist, and his wife, Katherine, had been living in the south of France with their children, Milo, now 10, and Ella, eight. Katherine had given up her job as an art director on a magazine and they had sold their flat in Primrose Hill, north London.

Mee juggled writing with converting their two barns. In June 2004 Katherine was diagnosed with a grade-four glio­blastoma brain tumour. She completed a course of chemotherapy but her doctors warned her and Mee that the tumour would return.

Meanwhile, his mother, Amelia, was looking to downsize after losing her husband. Mee’s sister, Melissa, came across an estate agent’s brochure for Dartmoor Wildlife Park. The park was for sale at the same asking price – £1.2 million – as Amelia’s home. Knowing Mee’s lifelong fascination with animals, Melissa posted the brochure to him in France with a note: "Your dream scenario."

"We all started focusing on this zoo," Mee explains. "My dad would have said it was bloody ridiculous. He was a man who had come from a working-class mining town and built up his small fortune by being careful and working hard, but he wasn’t there." All the siblings agreed that the zoo would be a wonderful project for Amelia to be part of. They would each put their £50,000 inheritance into the pot and decide later who would move into the 12-bedroom house with Amelia.

Persuading Amelia was easy: for her 73rd birthday she had spent a day as a big cat keeper, and she loved the idea of owning a zoo. But buying the zoo was not so simple. The first offer was rejected in favour of a higher bid. But that sale fell through and a year later, in April 2006, Mee saw a news story announcing there were 11 days to find a buyer or the animals would be put down. He knew he had to try again. Katherine, however, was not keen. "I had made her sell our precious London flat to move to France so I could write a book and now I wanted us to buy a zoo," Mee says. "She thought I should just finish what I’d started."

Of Katherine’s initial resistance he adds, "We had a 10-year relationship with very few arguments. Her job was to shoot down my more outrageous ideas, which she did beautifully. But this was a decision that was going to affect the next 10-15 years of our lives. If she wasn’t going to live that long – I was desperately searching for a cure, but the doctors kept telling us the tumour would return – then it would be me bringing up the children alone and I couldn’t think of a more incredible place to live."

Scarlett Johansson and Matt Damon in We Bought A ZooCredit:
Film stills/Neal Preston

He managed to persuade Katherine (they kept the French barns, which Mee has since sold), but his brother Henry, who was the executor of his father’s will, mounted a legal challenge to stop the purchase. Eventually Henry agreed to the purchase going ahead, but withdrew his £50,000 investment. This has taken its toll on the family: Benjamin and Henry no longer speak.

Finally, in October 2006, the sale went through at £1.1 million. But by then the council had revoked the zoo’s licence: rotten fence posts and faulty electric fences were not safe and pathways had become unwalkable.

And on the fourth day of their new lives, the jaguar escaped. An inexperienced keeper had not bolted the enclosure correctly and Sovereign jumped into the neighbouring enclosure, intent on fighting Tammy the Siberian tiger. Mee’s first job as a zoo director was to decide which animal to shoot dead. Fortunately it didn’t come to that – Tammy’s keeper managed to coax her back into her house and lock her inside. After an anxious night spent waiting for an anaesthetic dart gun to arrive from another zoo, Sovereign was sedated and returned to his enclosure. The zoo was spared a bloody battle. The keeper was fired.

At the start of the Mees’ tenure, the zoo was costing £3,000 a week in utility bills, animal feed and staff wages. Mee needed £500,000 to make urgent repairs before he would be allowed to let the paying public back in (he needed 60,000 visitors a year to break even). He had already melted down credit cards and had even driven Amelia to a cash dispenser to withdraw the last of her savings. In a BBC documentary about the zoo in 2007 cameras catch an increasingly desperate Mee begging a bank manager for money, saying, "The wolves are at the door…" and, with his trademark humour, pausing to add, "… literally".

The next six months were exhausting. Just before Christmas Katherine’s tumour returned. In January she started another course of chemo­therapy, which left her with debilitating depression. The loan was finally secured in February and repairs started immediately, but not before Parker, one of the wolves, escaped. After a frantic hunt involving armed police, Parker was caught in a quarry two miles away.

Benjamin Mee’s mother, Amelia, sold the family home in Surrey in order to buy Dartmoor Zoological ParkCredit:
Chloe Dewe Mathews

Katherine died on March 31 2007, after two months of fading mobility, speech and mental clarity ("Most of the physical difficulties I could cope with, like helping her dress and go to the toilet, but I couldn’t bear to see her surprised that the light was controlled by the light switch"). But Mee could not give into his own grief – he had only two months until the zoo inspection.

His extraordinary will and determination to succeed meant they passed, and on July 7 they opened to the public as the rebranded Dartmoor Zoological Park, with signs that Katherine had designed. "Opening day was such a relief," Mee says. "But all day strangers – who knew our story from the local paper – kept coming up to me saying, 'Katherine would have been so proud of you.' I wasn’t expecting it. I had to go to the office to take a breath, but someone had put up my favourite picture of her on the wall. When I saw her there looking at me, I cried for two hours."

Mee takes a brief pause from his story to thank some people walking past for visiting the zoo. They say they have heard that there is a Hollywood film being made about the zoo. He laughs and tells them it is true. Mee still cannot really believe it. He had written about the whole experience in a book, We Bought a Zoo, published in 2008. A year later 20th Century Fox bought the rights and brought Cameron Crowe on board to direct. Matt Damon was cast as Mee (who was delighted: "I believed he was thoughtful, self-aware and self-deprecating"). Within 20 months ("the fastest project I have ever worked on," Crowe says) the film was completed.

As befits a Hollywood tear-jerker, Katherine’s death frames the plot. In the film she dies before Mee buys the zoo but she is shown through a series of flashbacks: "She’s not here, and yet she’s there in every scene," Crowe tells me. The chronology of the story has shifted and the drama has been relocated to California, but the heart of the film is that rebuilding the rundown animal park is a restorative exercise for the bereaved family.

Matt Damon with tiger in We Bought A ZooCredit:
Film stills/Neal Preston

"That is how I feel about the zoo," Mee says. "Rebuilding it was cathartic. But the zoo itself is also a tremendous place for healing. It connects you to the circle of life. We have births, we have deaths and they remind you that we are just another family unit that has suffered a loss – like the tigers who lost their grand­father or the tapirs who had a stillborn calf."

Mee checks his watch, jumping up from the bench and startling a peacock nestling at our feet. He is late to pick up the children. Life as a single father is a challenge that he says starts "with a frantic search for the kids’ clothes" before breakfast, dropping them off at school ("They usually need sports kit or costumes or any number of things which I might have forgotten"), overseeing the zoo, before going back to pick them up at 3pm. His affinity for single parents is reflected in admission prices with a discount for them on Tuesdays.

Matt Damon tells me over the phone from Los Angeles that the idea of suddenly becoming a bereaved, single parent was one of the things that drew him to the story. "For me, as a father, I was moved by the idea of how you help your children get through the loss of their mother and how you bring them up without your partner." Crowe thinks the best part is that the story continues in real life: "You can leave the movie theatre and go through the turnstiles into Dartmoor zoo."

The film ends with the zoo opening on a glorious Californian day with families queuing to get in (including the real Mees, who have cameo roles). But the reality in Dartmoor was of course very different.

The July they opened was the wettest for 100 years, with the following three summers barely any better. Mee needed 1,000 visitors a day; instead he says it was not unusual to get four people. "I used to look at the sky and every time it was raining I would think, 'That’s £5,000 we should have made today.'"

Despite an initial £30,000 for the rights and another £250,000 once the film went into production (he will also get five per cent of net profits from the film), Mee was still in financial straits. His monthly bills were £47,000 for wages, amenities and food. "At the end of every month I was worrying that we simply wouldn’t survive long enough for the film to come out."

The Mees have not wasted any money on beautifying their own home, and living conditions have been tough for Amelia particularly. But, Mee says, "she loves owning the zoo. The stimulation of being part of such a busy environment has kept her mentally and physically active far beyond how she might have fared on her own. She feeds the monkeys in the morning, and watches the cheetah while doing her early-morning exercises. And we have finally managed to wire up her kiln in the house, so now she is making ceramic water bowls for some of the smaller animals, and animal models to sell in the shop."

Mee seems almost pained when I ask him which is his favourite animal in the zoo – as if I were forcing him to choose between his children – but admits that the two tapirs are top of the list. "They are like a married couple," he says. "You can tell when they’ve had an argument because one will be in the house and the other one will be swimming in the pond. Otherwise they are inseparable."

Conservation is Mee’s passion. The zoo has three Siberian tigers; in the wild there are now fewer than 400. Although the zoo cannot breed from the tigers – the previous owner was not judicious about properly monitoring mating among his animals and as a result most of the big cats are genetically related – Mee explains the importance of having them in zoos: "I don’t particularly like looking at animals behind wire. But, as a zoo director, I understand that it is absolutely essential that we keep them there. We can build up a broad genetic population in zoos and then if we can work out a way to regain an area the size of Siberia, just for tigers, then we can re-release them."

Recently the zoo has been given a pair of endangered white-naped cranes, and Dartmoor has been accepted on to a breeding programme monitored by the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria.

It is after closing time, and Milo and Ella are playing with the pygmy goats under a 400-year-old oak tree in the middle of the park. Milo says that after school they help the keepers feed the animals, and on Saturdays and holidays they teach other children in the education department. Mee smiles. The zoo, he says, has enriched their lives in ways he could not have anticipated. Recently he was walking with Ella through a field of bluebells next to the wolves’ enclosure.

"She was dressed in her red cape and running ahead of me, with the wolves loping silently alongside her. I watched her and thought, 'How many little girls can run along in their red riding hood outfits being chased by real wolves?' That’s what I’ve been able to do for her."